Cool news for all parents: There’s now a child-friendly version of YouTube. It was released this week in the United States but European launches are yet to be announced. YouTube Kids is an app that shows only videos that are ok for any kid to see.

So what’s different in YouTube Kids compared to the normal YouTube? The videos are carefully filtered so there’s nothing that’s not ok for kids to see. Comments are hidden completely. The search is more simple and has a voice recognition system for the smallest kids. There’s also lots of parental controls for limiting the time of use and so on.

All this works great for the young kids. 3-4 year olds will have a blast with the app. Getting older, kids need a bit more.

When the solution becomes the problem

Something happens when the kids hit school age. Favorite bands become important, and some want to make their own videos. Both of those things could be a problem with YouTube Kids. All content goes through strict filtering, meaning music videos and videos uploaded by less-known users might not make the cut. At least there will be a waiting time.

For years, YouTube has had a safety mode. It aims to filter out the worst videos, making the video selection more appropriate for kids and preteens. Our product Momio also has a YouTube page where kids can watch fun videos. We’re doing a lot to minimise bad content. Before ending up on Momio, the videos run through YouTube’s safe search and our own word filters. Our staff also deletes videos that are deemed inappropriate.

In the end, we can offer lots more videos than YouTube Kids. We think the good outweighs the potential bad here. Posting videos is a way to build your identity, and our method allows the kids to show off their favorite music videos, films, jokes and celebrity clips – and most importantly, the videos they made and uploaded to YouTube themselves.

Even if YouTube Kids is not the solution for all kids, we welcome it to the market. If we could make one wish, we hope that YouTube takes the learnings from the Kids app and with them, improves the safety mode even further. That would be for the good of children everywhere!

About the author:

Silja Nielsen, Momio

Silja Nielsen is Head of Community and Safety at Momio. She has worked at the company since 2010. Silja has a master’s degree in Media Studies and is interested in privacy, online behaviour and online communities.

Most of us have heard of Facebook’s age limit. Less commonly known is that many other popular social media services have restrictions for kids and young people. Those are set for three main reasons:

1) Protecting children’s privacy. Many companies providing social media services are based in USA. According to US law, users under 13-year old are not allowed to create an account on services that collect personal information, such as whole name and email address. This applies all users.

2) Understanding that kids are kids. Young children don’t always have enough wisdom to make smart decisions online.

In some services, it’s possible for an underaged kid to use the product with a verifiable parental consent. Other services forbid kids under a certain age completely.

List of restrictions

We made a list of the widely used social media and their age limitations. Due to country specific restrictions, the age requirements can be higher than listed.

About the author:

Pia Edman, Momio

Pia Edman worked as a Finnish Community Manager from 2009 to 2015. She has several years of experience in working with online communities and online safety as well as with digital content creation and digital advertising. Pia has a master’s degree in Finnish language.

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Online safety matters should be constantly actual, but today they are in focus even more than usually. The reason for that is the international Safer Internet Day that promotes safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially amongst children and young people.

Safer Internet Day is organized by the European Insafe network which is comprised of 31 national awareness centers. It has taken place since 2004 and also involves countries outside Europe.

In some countries, the day has evolved into a whole week of activities. For instance in Finland, the National Audiovisual Institute arranges Media Literacy Week together with different organizations and companies. watAgame has participated in the event a few times by creating and spreading educational content and giving free advertising space.

Change your panties!

We here at watAgame consider every day as safer internet day, but around the international theme day we naturally give some extra attention to safety issues. One of the things we focus on is educating the users in password safety.

On goSupermodel, a very successful campaign regarding this was implemented a couple of years ago with the strapline ”Change your panties”. The main message was that you should treat your passwords the same way as your underpants: Don’t show them to others, don’t borrow them to friends and make sure you change them regularly.

This year, passwords are in focus on Momio. The Momio police character, Jack, teaches users password safety with help of competitions and other activities.

If you haven’t talked about online safety with your kids, today certainly is a good day to do so!

About the author:

Pia Edman, Momio

Pia Edman worked as a Finnish Community Manager from 2009 to 2015. She has several years of experience in working with online communities and online safety as well as with digital content creation and digital advertising. Pia has a master’s degree in Finnish language.